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(17) A further consideration is that if every soul is to be
held dissoluble the universe must long since have ceased to be:
if it is pretended that one kind of soul, our own for example, is
mortal, and another, that of the All, let us suppose, is
immortal, we demand to know the reason of the difference alleged.
Each is a principle of motion, each is self-living, each touches
the same sphere by the same tentacles, each has intellection of
the celestial order and of the super-celestial, each is seeking
to win to what has essential being, each is moving upwards to the
primal source.
Again: the soul's understanding of the Absolute Forms by means of
the visions stored up in it is effected within itself; such
perception is reminiscence; the soul then must have its being
before embodiment, and drawing on an eternal science, must itself
be eternal.
Every dissoluble entity, that has come to be by way of groupment,
must in the nature of things be broken apart by that very mode
which brought it together: but the soul is one and simplex,
living not in the sense of potential reception of life but by its
own energy; and this can be no cause of dissolution.
But, we will be told, it tends to destruction by having been
divided (in the body) and so becoming fragmentary.
No: the soul, as we have shown, is not a mass, not a quantity.
May not it change and so come to destruction?
No: the change that destroys annuls the form but leaves the
underlying substance: and that could not happen to anything
except a compound.
If it can be destroyed in no such ways, it is necessarily
indestructible.
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